PEAR: Prototyping Expressive Animated Robots - A Framework for Social Robot Prototyping

Abstract

Social robots are transitioning from lab experiments to commercial products, creating new needs for proto-typing and design tools. In this paper, we present a framework to facilitate the prototyping of expressive animated robots. For this, we start by reviewing the design of existing social robots in order to define a set of basic components of social robots. We then show how to extend an existing 3D animation software to enable the animation of these components. By composing those basic components, robots of various morphologies can be prototyped and animated. We show the capabilities of the presented framework through 2 case studies.